I went over to the sargent, said, "Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug." He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send you fingerprints off to Washington." — Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant

I was wondering when somebody was going to mention this. I used to be Mormon, and we had the same deal: nobody got paid for sacraments.

In addition, my grandfather was a Baptist minister. He never took money except maybe to cover gas. He once got paid a couple thousand for a sermon; he turned around and put the check in the offering plate the next week.

It think it has a lot to do with general societal decline: everyone has the sense that something is going wrong but we're all jumping to different conclusions about what that is, and hanging on to them for dear life because that's all we've got to make sense of the world.

Irrational beliefs simply play into the hysteria more easily than ones that can be easily checked and lend themselves to subtlety and nuance.

That's what I've been thinking for a while now. It used to be a dream of mine to move to the UK. Now I find myself shaking my head watching them racing America to see who can be more stupidly authoritarian.

I disagree. Licensing work under a copyleft license when you disagree with IP entirely is playing the game: it's a defensive maneuver, using the system against itself.

What Molyneux did went beyond legitimate defense. It's more like someone against drug laws turning in a neighbor for smoking pot because they keep throwing trash on his lawn. There are more appropriate ways of handling the situation than abusing an already-unjust law.

I would argue current copyright is unconstitutional because it completely deviates from the intent of the constitution, not because of any ammendments.

Oh, I completely agree. Even without the first amendment, copyright has obviously gone far beyond it constitutional mandate, especially when things like retroactive term extension get involved; how that adds to the original artist's incentive is beyond me.